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“Summer of Justice” recap

Hot.

The so-called “Summer of Justice” protest week was…hot.

Wichita, Kansas, site of the original 1991 so-called “Summer of Mercy” protests, for which these protests were intended to be an anniversary celebration and renewal, has been experiencing a heat wave. Not exactly unusual for the third week in July. But that’s the week chosen by Rusty Thomas, director of Operation Save America, who went on to say “I pray what God began in 1991, he’s going to complete in 2016.”

Not being God, I can only offer my own view: I hope the “completed” part is true.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Last Thursday, during the protest week, David S. Cohen, co-author of the new book Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism, gave a talk at a local bookstore. He told the stories of abortion providers who have been harassed, threatened, and in some cases outright attacked in the decades since Roe v. Wade was decided.

He told us of doctors, medical assistants, clinic owners, and volunteers who have been forced to wear disguises and take alternate routes to work because of threats, whose children have been stalked at school, and in one case had her personal information including home address published in a “newsletter” that was distributed to pro-life prisoners currently serving time. Yes, pro-life violent criminals were informed, during their prison sentence, that the only way to stop abortionists is with a bullet and by the way, here’s one of their home addresses.

At this point, I had already contacted Trust Women to express a desire to do something to help during the upcoming anniversary protest. Operation Save America had been kind enough to publish an anticipated schedule for the week, including speakers (note the gender of all involved), and I wanted to be useful in some way during what would surely be a stressful time for both South Wind Women’s Center (Dr. George Tiller’s former clinic: see this post and this post) and the Planned Parenthood central Wichita location.

I’ve gone to this Planned Parenthood location several times, with a positive experience each time. But security is something of a concern. At the Repro Rally on July 9, Planned Parenthood was accepting volunteers to act as escorts from the parking lot to the door of the clinic. South Wind, by contrast, has a secure private parking lot, which is something of a luxury in that it doesn’t seem to be very common for clinics that provide abortion services (though it should, in my humble view, be ubiquitous and government-funded).

So my initial question for Trust Women/South Wind was whether they’d like support in the form of counter-protest, and was told no– actually, engaging the protesters would be counter productive. But maybe I could be a legal observer?  A legal observer’s job is to observe, obviously, via your eyes and ears and video recording device and camera and notepad and however else you can notice, record, and document what’s going on. Not being a confrontational person (to put it lightly), this seemed to me an ideal way to help out.  What, you mean I don’t have to shout at people who hate me?  I can just be present, and pay attention? Sign me up!

So I was signed up. I got trained. I met some really cool people in the process, whose identities I won’t give here for privacy’s sake, but I can say this: Everybody cared. Everybody wanted to do something to defend the right to an abortion on the ground, against an onslaught of people who want to attack it on that level.

But we weren’t fighting– we were explicitly not fighting. That, of course, didn’t stop protesters from approaching us, once they figured out that we weren’t part of their group. We didn’t make it blatantly obvious, of course– no pro-choice t-shirts or signs. Just some people wandering around, watching, who were distinguished somewhat by the fact that we weren’t wearing t-shirts with big crosses on them or waving signs.

I trained on one day, and observed on two days following that. The protesters who approached me, on both days, were always men. Men over the age of 35, of varying degrees of politeness ranging from “Have a nice day” to “What you’re doing is evil, and I hope you know that.”

The number of signs and slogans that co-opted Black Lives Matter, and the wider movement against police racism and brutality, was astonishing.

No one, to my knowledge, was arrested. There was ample police presence, and the police officers were friendly to everyone. From what I observed they didn’t interact much with either the protesters or the legal observers. I was profoundly grateful for their presence– for obvious reasons, but also because it made my job decidedly easier.

So let’s talk about that now. Let’s talk about how last Saturday, the final day of the protest, I was observing until the official end, and I observed several protesters walk up to police officers and thank them for not arresting them. The “Thank you” part is great– no issue with that.  The “…for not arresting us” part is slightly different.

Pro-life protesters: They weren’t not arresting you because they’re nice, or because they respect or agree with you. They weren’t arresting you because, for the most part, you weren’t breaking the law.

The police are not on a crusade to arrest the virtuous pro-lifer at the behest of the evil abortion provider– they’re there to enforce the law, and the abortion providers and volunteers are happy to see them do it.  Due to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, protesters may not physically prevent doctors or other clinic personnel from entering the clinic, and you did not do that. You just shouted at them, with microphones and amplifiers. For the most part, you stayed where it was legal to stay. That is why you didn’t get arrested.

Freedom of speech protects your right to gather in groups and tell lies on the sidewalk. For better or for worse.

And boy, were there a lot of lies.

I often wonder about how the pro-life movement would look if everyone, nationwide, actually understood what abortion is.

When I see a pro-life lie about abortion, I have long since stopped thinking in terms of “liars for Jesus,” because there’s one critical problem with admonishing people for their supposed hypocrisy in violating one of the Ten Commandments in the name of their faith: You cannot lie if you don’t know what you’re saying is untrue. And I honestly don’t think they know.  They haven’t ever been taught the truth, so they don’t know that what they’re proclaiming is a lie.

Ignorance is the greatest enemy of human rights.

These people think that Planned Parenthood sells baby parts.

These people think there is such a thing as “post abortive syndrome,” where women who get abortions find themselves in a state of long-lasting regret and even self-destructive behavior afterward.

These people think that women get abortions because they are promiscuous, lazy, and/or selfish.

These people think that abortion harms/risks your body in ways that pregnancy and giving birth do not.

These people think that providing abortion services for minorities, who, due to poverty, are in greater need of abortion services, is racist.

These people preach against homosexuality and birth control at the same time as abortion, because they think “be fruitful and multiply” is a God-given mandate.

These people think that “viable” means a fetus is a healthy baby.

These people think banning abortion would end the killing of babies, rather than resume the killing and imprisonment of women.

These people think that abortion providers, people receiving abortions, and people defending the right to abortion don’t know what they’re doing. They think we don’t know what abortion is.

Ignorance really is the greatest enemy of human rights.

Happy not to be on that team

I can’t help wondering if, after having established his character Dilbert as the office Everyman, Scott Adams has somehow welded himself permanently into that role– in his own perception, at least. That perhaps after such a long time of speaking to the Dilberts of America and the world, Adams has managed to convince himself that he also speaks for them. 


Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just your typical bigot universalism tendency. Maybe that’s what it always has been. Either way, Adams has decided that the Democratic National Convention is very likely lowering the testosterone of American men, and thereby their happiness, on a national scale. 


Why is this? Because the celebration of woman aspiring to positions of power that they have never held throughout the country’s history– specifically, the presidency– makes Adams feel defeated:

I watched singer Alicia Keys perform her song Superwoman at the convention and experienced a sinking feeling. I’m fairly certain my testosterone levels dropped as I watched, and that’s not even a little bit of an exaggeration. Science says men’s testosterone levels rise when they experience victory, and drop when they experience the opposite. I watched Keys tell the world that women are the answer to our problems. True or not, men were probably not feeling successful and victorious during her act. Let me say this again, so you know I’m not kidding. Based on what I know about the human body, and the way our thoughts regulate our hormones, the Democratic National Convention is probably lowering testosterone levels all over the country. Literally, not figuratively. And since testosterone is a feel-good chemical for men, I think the Democratic convention is making men feel less happy. They might not know why they feel less happy, but they will start to associate the low feeling with whatever they are looking at when it happens, i.e. Clinton.

I’m sure that you– but perhaps not Adams– have already heard the aphorism “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Maybe you’ve acknowledged it, though, without trying to stop and consider whether it really feels like oppression.  I can’t actually say, one way or another– I don’t know of any scientific studies that can verify it (though if you do, please let me know).

And Adams is making a scientific statement here. He’s saying that watching and listening to Alicia Keys perform Superwoman made him feel like a loser. That this feeling of non-triumph means lower testosterone, and therefore that this feeling must be spreading across the country and lowering testosterone levels on a national scale.  Wow!

So what if he’s right? Let’s just assume he is, for the sake of argument.

Power can certainly be a zero-sum game– if someone gains it, somebody else is losing it. Adams described the feeling he was having as like losing. Being non-triumphant. I believe him about that. I believe that to someone who sees the world in hierarchical terms and has bought stock in just-world bias, equality feels like losing.

He gets two things wrong about this, though.

First, he thinks that because he feels like a loser, he’s been somehow wronged. “Superwoman” apparently profoundly disturbed his worldview, and rather than question that worldview he blames the song, Alisha Keys, the DNC, Hillary Clinton, or all of the above for harming him. I feel bad, those people made me feel bad, those people are wrong!

Second, he universalizes– he thinks that all American men feel bad, or should feel bad, right along with him. He wants to bring a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all men against feeling bad, without ever checking to see whether everybody else who identifies as male feels like a loser too. Presumably at least some of them don’t– there were men at the DNC, right? A few of them? Was any footage captured of them bending over in agony while Alisha Keys was singing, protecting their genitalia?

That’s a common tendency of bigots– white supremacists assume that all white people are white supremacists, homophobes assume all straight people are homophobes, etc. and that anyone who isn’t is either lying or a traitor. Scott Adams, of course, assumes that all men are as threatened as he is by women in powerful positions.

Thankfully, he’s mistaken about that.

Let me restate that more emphatically– thankfully, Scott Adam is wrong. He does not get to speak for mankind, any more than any other fearful member of the majority gets to speak against a minority.

When I posted about this on Facebook, my friend Ben Pobjie commented:

He assumes that being male is like being on a team, and we all put that team first and identify with other members of that team before all else. I might be threatened by women in powerful positions if I thought I was on the same team as Scott Adams, and that the purpose of life was to be on the winning team.

When you think in those terms, it’s really a choice you make– do you define your “team” based on incidental characteristics and then push for them to win, whatever “winning” is supposed to mean? Or do you choose your team based on what they say and do, regardless of these other differences, and work together for common goals rather than common traits?

I seem to have less and less time, these days, for people who choose the former.

How many more?

Three more police officers were killed today, in Baton Rouge. Three injured. The same word used as in Dallas— “ambush.”

The fear and despair I’m feeling right now are mostly due to three beliefs: that such killings a) might have been inevitable, b) will certainly only make things worse, and c) may well happen again.

Black Lives Matter is of course both a slogan and a movement, and the movement’s leaders have disavowed violence against police officers. But America is certainly fond of binary thinking of the “you’re with us or against us” variety. Onlookers have gathered in a circle around this conflict like a group of children yelling “Fight! Fight!” Especially those who have drawn a line of allegiance between BLM and The Police, and have donned their #AllLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter, and “I Can Breathe” t-shirts to signify which side they’ve chosen.

My friend Ed Brayton remarked that he was experiencing writer’s block in the wake of the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castille, followed by the killing of five police officers in Dallas.  But he still managed to make the following observation that I think should be preserved:

This is not the least bit surprising to anyone who has paid attention to the problem over the years. And so we have the Black Lives Matter movement protesting against such injustice and brutality. And while you may dislike some of their tactics, they are right on the core issue. Our criminal justice system really is racist from top to bottom. Anyone who denies that cannot possibly have seen all the data that supports it, data that I have been presenting for more than a decade. And then we have two men who gunned down 11 police officers in Dallas on Thursday night, at the end of a long and peaceful protest against this injustice. What they did is horrifying and wrong in every possible way and it will do nothing but undermine efforts to address the problem. But unlike the unjust and racist treatment of black people in this country, that is an incident that is merely anecdotal, not systemic. But let’s also recognize that it was virtually inevitable. I have been saying this for years: When you oppress people, you radicalize them. If you do nothing to address legitimate grievances and fix problems, it is inevitable that some small portion of the victims of that oppression are going to choose violence as a response. That doesn’t justify it, but it does help explain it. If you cannot change as a result of non-violent protest, you make violent protest inevitable. And here’s the real problem: All this does is perpetuate the cycle of violence. Like the Hatfields and McCoys, every act of violence is then used to justify the next reprisal, which is then used to justify the next one, and the next one. At some point, the violence has to stop. But the only ones who can really stop it are those with power, which means law enforcement, courts and politicians. Violence on the part of those who protest against state-sanctioned killing is a response to the misuse of power, not an expression of power. It is up to those with power to fix this. No one else can.

What I fear is that Ed is right…but that those with power will not fix this. That they will just double down, using the killing of these officers as justification.

By all accounts, BLM and the police of Dallas actually had a decent relationship prior to the post-protest ambush, and hopefully will manage to repair that relationship in the wake of it.  The same probably cannot be said of Baton Rouge. But that’s kind of the point– these things differ from state to state, city to city. Police departments have different approaches, including Richmond, California police chief Chris Magnus’s decision to stress de-escalation and the development of a positive relationship with citizens above all else.

Here in Wichita, a peaceful Black Lives Matter rally last Tuesday led both protesters and police to declare the event a success, and they’re holding a cookout tonight, in lieu of another march, in the spirit of improving community relations.

All of which tells me that progress is being made on a local level. Quantifiable measures like the increase of police departments using body cameras are one way to recognize this, but of course body cams aren’t a panacea– no simple increase in accountability can be, though we still absolutely need increased accountability!

But what we also need, so very desperately, is a paradigm shift.  Nationally, we have to recognize that being opposed to racism and brutality in a police force is absolutely not the same as being anti-cop (any more, as one meme noted, than being anti-child abuse is the same as being anti-parent).

We have to acknowledge that the more police officers are different and separated from the communities in which they operate, the more empathy for people in those communities is diminished. No police department is an occupying force. Every police department is composed of human beings entrusted with tremendous power and authority to enforce the law, who are still human beings.  For better and for worse.

The “for betters” like the examples of Chris Magnus, like Wichita’s police chief Gordon Ramsay (yes, our police chief’s name is Gordon Ramsay and he’s organizing a cookout– what?) should be encouraged, rewarded, and perpetuated.

And when it comes to the “for worse,” to the biases and cover-ups and abuses…there are ways to counteract these. We absolutely must work to counteract these.  Our local communities and our national community depend on it.

Too adult to Pokemon

The late comedian Mitch Hedberg had a joke about Little League. It went like this: “I wish I could play Little League now; I’d kick some fuckin’ ass.”

Pokemon Go is not Little League.

Pokemon Go is a mobile game that anybody with a smart phone can play, and apparently nearly everybody is playing it. Everybody, that is, except for a few stalwart defenders of the dignity of adulthood, who maintain that they’re not playing that game because it’s for kids.

I feel sorry for those people.

I used to be one of those people.

See, I’ve been playing video games all my life, starting with the Atari 2600 and never stopping, so the notion that video games in general are just for kids has never held water for me. But somehow when Pokemon came to the United States in the late 90’s, I decided that this particular video game franchise was for kids, and therefore not me.

I made a similar error with Harry Potter– these books are for ten-year-olds! Aren’t the adults reading them embarrassed?

Turns out no, they’re not. They’re just happily enjoying a series of books in genre of fiction that they happen to love, and which are– from all I’ve heard– really good (I still haven’t gotten around to reading the books, but that’s no longer because I’m too busy sneering at them. Just haven’t had time to read them.)

But I have started playing Pokemon (currently level 11, Team Instinct), because I realized that I’m no longer too old too enjoy it. I never was.

An adult enjoying Pokemon is unlike an adult playing Little League, or taking part in an Easter egg hunt, or trick-or-treating, because those things are all zero-sum games. An adult taking part in them means that children don’t get to, or at least don’t get to take part to the extent that they otherwise would.

Unless you’re literally knocking children out of the way to capture a Pokemon, which would be wrong regardless, your playing the game is not trampling on anybody.  Do not listen to the haters saying otherwise. But also if you aren’t interested in playing, don’t play. I doubt there’s a video game player alive who is interested in all genres of games equally, and you can’t play them all, even if you wanted to.

But don’t be a hater yourself.  As a frequently-quoted Adam Ellis cartoon says, “Shhh. Let people enjoy things.”

Good luck, Indiana

Your governor is a monster.

So’s mine, of course– my governor is Sam Brownback, after all. But yours might be even worse.

Why’s that? Well, because on Thursday Indiana’s Governor Mike Pence signed into law a bill that makes abortion illegal in the event that a woman seeks one because of fetal disability– any kind of fetal disability– and framed it as “a comprehensive pro-life measure that affirms the value of all human life.” As the worst monsters always do, he depicted a heinous attack on human rights as a righteous act.

Before I go into what’s so horrible about this bill, I want to first acknowledge that it’s almost certainly blatantly unconstitutional. To my knowledge, there is no legal basis for banning abortions that would otherwise be legal based on the reason a woman wants one. And Indiana’s law doesn’t just ban abortions performed because of fetal disability– it also bans abortions based on the race, color, national origin, ancestry, or sex of the fetus. Abortion was deemed a fundamental right in Roe v. Wade, and fundamental rights can’t be abridged based on a person’s motive for exercising them. One would think.

Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, made a great comment about the specifications of the bill: “They basically took non-discrimination language and made it an abortion ban.”  It’s always fun when conservatives pretend to care about diversity and egalitarianism purely for the sake of trying to make liberals look like hypocrites. What’s not fun is that this tactic is often remarkably effective, because on first blush a liberal might fully agree that women shouldn’t abort based on any of those factors. After all, none of these traits are the kid’s fault!  They’re circumstances of birth!

Yeah, well…there’s a problem there. Because we’re not talking about a kid. We’re not talking about about circumstances of birth, because we’re not talking about someone about someone who has been born. A fetus that is aborted will never experience discrimination, because that fetus will not experience anything. A fetus does not care why it was aborted, because a fetus doesn’t care about anything. The result of abortion is the same for every fetus, regardless of why the abortion occurred.

If we agree that a fetus is not a person (in the legal sense), then the fetus has no rights.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to privacy, or the right not to be discriminated against (which, again, social conservatives don’t generally support in the first place)– non-people do not have rights.

If we don’t agree that a fetus isn’t a person, which is to say, you think they are people…then every abortion is equally murder. Reasons don’t matter. We don’t just ban murders that take place because of discrimination– they’re illegal regardless.  So in that respect, passing a law that forbids abortion for discriminatory reasons is implicitly acknowledging that fetuses aren’t people.

That said, let’s get into the specific ramifications of this law, and why you’d have to be an utter sadist to support it.

1. The “disability” portion of the law forces women who know that their fetus has any sort of disability, including the ones it is very unlikely to survive, to carry their pregnancy to term. Imagine being pregnant and finding out that the being growing inside of you has anencephaly, meaning that it’s missing part of its brain, and is certain to die either before or immediately after birth. Imagine learning this in your first trimester. Imagine having no choice about whether to continue this pregnancy, because your governor wanted to “affirm the value of all human life.” Except, apparently, yours.

Because in addition to the emotional torture presented by the scenario above, being forced to continue such a pregnancy presents health risks for the pregnant woman. Brownsyne Tucker-Edmonds, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Indianapolis, commented of the bill that

It will require a woman, during one of the most devastating times in her life after learning of a fetal anomaly, to prolong her pregnancy even if against her wishes, and to potentially assume the greater health risks associated with doing so. Some women have cases in which the risk of death during a full-term pregnancy is more than 14 times higher than for a termination of pregnancy. 

2.  Even if the disability is not as severe as anencephaly, something with good chances of survival for years beyond birth, how many of these women can afford to care for a disabled child?  The second most-cited reason for abortion is the woman’s inability to afford a baby.  And that’s assuming a baby without disabilities.  The value of life for a disabled person, much as proponents of this law might claim otherwise, is not at issue here.

Rather, the cold, hard fact is that if a woman considers herself unable to afford having a “normal” child, then she’s probably quite a long distance from being able to care for a disabled one.  And– big shocker here, I know— Indiana’s House Enrolled Act 1337 does not come accompanied by a comprehensive provision for generous public assistance to the women it forces into this position.

3. Under this law, doctors face a wrongful death lawsuit if they perform an abortion for a woman who requests one after learning about a pregnancy complication.  That’s certainly likely to improve relations and communication between doctors and their patients, right?

….No:

Hal Lawrence, chief executive of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said the group, comprising roughly 30,000 doctors nationwide, strongly opposes the law because it could encourage a patient to withhold information from her doctor. A woman who, for example, learned her fetus carried a severe disability may pursue an abortion from an out-of-state provider and then, out of fear, skip follow-up care from her regular doctor. “She shouldn’t be under legal duress when she came back to where she lived,” said Lawrence, who practiced gynecology for 30 years. “Patients need postpartum or postoperative care. They need to be counseled for contraception. Discouraging that is highly destructive.”

4. The law effectively bans fetal tissue research. Not that clinics in Indiana participate in such currently, but this will sure prevent them from considering the idea.  And that’s because…

5. The law requires that all fetal remains, whether from abortion or even from an early miscarriage, be buried or cremated.

Normally when a pregnancy ends earlier than 20 weeks, the “products of conception” (fetal tissue and the placenta) are treated like any other medical waste. After 20 weeks, the fetus is considered a “stillbirth” and the parents typically have the option to cremate or bury it if they choose. So even if a woman has a miscarriage at 8 weeks of pregnancy at home, under this law she could be required to keep the blood and tissue, take it to a hospital, and have it buried or cremated by a funeral home. Abortion providers will probably have to take on extra costs and administrative burdens for all of those extra burials and cremations, and those costs would probably get passed on to the patients.

Then what happens if you abort or miscarry, but can’t afford to have the fetus buried or cremated?  If it’s an abortion, it sounds like you might not be able to get one at all.  If a miscarriage, well….I guess you’re just screwed.

So yeah, Indiana, this is what your governor has gotten you into. Did he think it through?  No, almost certainly not– all he saw was an opportunity to look like a virtuous pro-lifer, at the expense of every woman, and by extension most men, in the state.

Again, good luck. And I’m so sorry.

How the toupée fallacy enables judgmental jerks

The toupée fallacy is named for a particular example of the informal fallacy that goes something like this:

All toupées look fake; I’ve never seen one that I couldn’t tell was fake.

Like a lot of fallacies, it’s so painfully obvious when it’s spelled out that you might have a hard time believing that anyone actually entertains this kind of thought. You would immediately respond to a person who said this by replying “Look, genius, you only think that all toupées look fake because the only ones you’ve noticed have been the bad fake ones. The ones that are clearly fake.” They might respond by insisting that they’re very good at detecting the existence of toupées, but that would be beside the point– in fact, it would detract from the point they’re trying to make. If all toupées look fake, then it wouldn’t be necessary to have refined toupée detection skills to detect them.

And of course we wouldn’t care about detecting toupées at all, bad or not, if we weren’t judgmental about the act of wearing a toupée in the first place.  If we didn’t think that being “fake” was wrong, we would not care about “real” vs. “fake.” We most likely wouldn’t have a notion of “fake” in the first place. Instead of Fake Thing vs. Real Thing, there would simply be One Kind of Thing and Another Kind of Thing.

Toupées are kind of an outdated thing to be judgmental about, with the glaring exception of course being Donald Trump. Trump might be single-handedly keeping the toupée fallacy alive specifically regarding toupées. But not in general, because there are so many things people are judgmental about, so many places where people have decided that there’s a “fake” and a “real,” and I’m going to discuss a few.

Cosmetic surgery

The terms “cosmetic surgery” and “plastic surgery” are often used interchangeably, but cosmetic surgery is that brand of plastic surgery performed to enhance a patient’s appearance aesthetically.  The toupée fallacy among people who are judgmental about cosmetic surgery (and gosh, there are a lot of them) occurs because having surgery to improve your appearance is perceived to be wrong. By its own name (“cosmetic”) it’s not medically necessary, therefore it’s not necessary at all. And if you’re one of the people who thinks this way, you have an incentive to believe that cosmetic surgery is obvious– how else would you point out people who have had it and call them out as vain and silly?

But of course, only the obvious cosmetic surgery is obvious. In all other cases the “fake” is indistinguishable from the “real,” unless you happen to have before/after photos of the person in question. If you treat cosmetic surgery as kind of deception committed by a shallow person against the world, this distinction matters.  If you simply see it as a person opting to change his/her appearance for non-medical reasons, it does not. There is no real and fake– there is simply before and after.

No makeup

Wearing makeup is another way in which people– invariably women– are perceive as pulling one over on the world, specifically the heterosexual men of the world. Apparently it’s a crime to make your face look different, even on a temporary basis, because a man could look at it and not realize that you weren’t born looking that way.

The toupée fallacy here takes the form of insisting that women without makeup don’t just look better but are vaguely morally superior (by not taking part in the deception), and of course the person making the judgment can tell perfectly well whether a woman is wearing makeup or not.

Buzzfeed has a list of examples of people praising celebrity women for being “natural” and going without makeup when they are actually wearing minimal makeup or just non-obvious makeup.  If you’ve ever seen a makeup tutorial, you probably know that just as much time and work can go into a non-obvious makeup job as an obvious one.

So much of makeup is corrective– if a person spends an hour hiding her pimples and under-eye circles, and giving herself the appearance of more prominent cheekbones, how is that going to be distinguishable from someone who just has prominent cheekbones, and lacks pimples and under-eye circles?  And what is the moral difference if one of those people is wearing bright orange lipstick while the other is wearing colorless lip balm?

There isn’t one, of course. There are only aesthetic preferences turned normative judgments.

Fake geek girls

The toupée fallacy regarding “fake geek girls,” on the other hand, is not about aesthetic preference– or at least, not just about that. A fake geek girl is a girl who appears to enjoy comics, video games, tabletop games, etc. when she actually doesn’t– or doesn’t enjoy them sufficiently to count. This distinction matters to people who consider themselves gatekeepers of geekdom, and believe that there is an actual problem of girls pretending to be interested in geeky things in order to win the attention and affection of geeky boys.

This kind of person commits the toupée fallacy by assuming that he (generally “he,” but not necessarily) has both the authority and the ability to assess a woman’s actual interest in/knowledge of geeky things and compare it to how much she appears to enjoy these things. Because– again– there is something wrong with appearing to enjoy geeky things more than you actually do. Apparently.

Transmen and transwomen

This is far and away the place where committing the toupée fallacy has the worst consequence– it is literally a matter of life and death.

Transphobia often involves believing that you can tell the difference between trans men and “real” men, between trans women and “real” women, and that this difference matters because being transgender is fundamentally wrong.

Natalie Reed is a trans woman who wrote a blog post specifically about this issue called Passability and the Toupée Fallacy, which discusses the incredible injustice of demanding that trans people “pass” as their claimed gender identity in order to be treated as…well, as people.

To “transition” is to take measures (such as wearing different clothes, getting “top surgery,” hormone replacement therapy, etc.) to change your appearance to more closely match that gender identity, and some trans people transition while others do not. There are various reasons why a trans person might not transition. They might feel more comfortable in their current appearance. They might simply not have the financial ability. For those who do transition, there is a societal expectation that they will or should do so “enough,” if they want to have their identity respected. And in reality, there are people who will never accept that someone’s gender now can differ from the one to which they were assigned at birth. To these people the different gender identity will always be the “fake,” while the previous one was the “real.”

We are moving away from this perception, albeit glacially. It amazes me how strongly society believes that it, not the individual in question, controls their identity.

Because in each of these cases, control is ultimately what we’re talking about. When someone declares they can decide that who you are is “fake,” whereas what you used to be, or what somebody else is, is “real,” they are trying to control you.

They are saying their perception of you matters more than your own of yourself.  They’re saying that even when they can’t tell the difference between the so-called-fake and the so-called-real, this distinction matters, because there’s something wrong with the so-called-fake. Else they wouldn’t consider it fake to begin with.

That’s why this fallacy matters. I wish it only applied to toupées.

They’re coming back

Operation Save America, the successor to Operation Rescue, has announced that they’re returning to Wichita for a “Summer of Mercy” anniversary tour. The city is reportedly unenthused.

Hundreds of people from around the country are expected to converge in Wichita this summer for a week of anti-abortion rallies, protests and prayer vigils marking the 25th anniversary of the “Summer of Mercy” campaign. “Some of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life happened right here in Wichita,” said Rusty Thomas, director of Operation Save America, an anti-abortion group based in Waco, Texas. “What I’m writing in my brochure is: ‘Some of you were there. This is our reunion.’” Operation Save America is a successor to Operation Rescue, whose 46-day “Summer of Mercy” campaign in 1991 resulted in nearly 2,700 arrests as protesters blocked access to clinics where abortions were performed. This summer, July 16-23, the group plans to partner with local churches to organize protests against abortion. Its agenda includes “street activities” outside South Wind Women’s Center, a clinic operating at George Tiller’s former practice on East Kellogg, Thomas said. “There’s a proverb that says, ‘We make our plans but God directs our steps,’ ” he said. “We go to these evil places and address that evil and hopefully overcome it and set the captive free.”

Except there are no captives that need to be set free, and there won’t be, ironically, until Operation Save America comes to town and resumes their place caterwauling in the street and generally making life miserable for abortion providers and patients, but accomplishing nothing else. Which is as much as they accomplished the first time in 1991.

In a post discussing the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in 2009, reporter Mary Mapes reflected on the protest:

These “rescuers” — sweaty mobs of zombie-like true believers — swarmed across the street in front of the clinic like angry ants. They crawled over the hot asphalt toward his office on their hands and knees. They collapsed onto the stairs, chained themselves to the fence, shrieked prayers and threats and bellowed the Biblical equivalent of evil spells at anyone who approached the place. They fell lifelessly to the ground, some of them swooning and crashing spectacularly to earth. When I went to Wichita to cover this, I thought I would be assigned there for a day or two. But this became more than a single protest. It turned out to be the birthplace of heartland civil disobedience against abortion and it went on and on and on.

The New York Times reported:

For nearly three weeks now, this city has become the most vivid symbol of an emboldened anti-abortion movement as members of Operation Rescue focus on the city’s three abortion clinics, flinging themselves under cars, sitting by the hundreds at clinic doorways and blocking women from entering as they read them Scripture. The confrontations have resulted in more than 1,600 arrests and the closing of all three abortion clinics for more than a week in late July. The city has had to assign nearly a quarter of its police force to control the protests, and a Federal judge earlier this week ordered Federal marshals to keep the clinics open. The confrontations show no sign of abating, and some doctors have had to perform abortions in the predawn hours to avoid disruption. Leaders of the protest say they plan to stay indefinitely. 

As a Wichitan who witnessed the protests in 1991 (though I was in middle school at the time) and who lives here now, there’s one word that describes my immediate feeling about this: dread.

DiTHBINAD

Screenshot from Firewatch

Feminist Frequency has begun producing a newsletter called FREQ, and their first edition is an interview with Jane Ng. Ng is a 3D environmental artist who most recently worked on Firewatch, which looks like an amazing game. You can read the interview with her here.

My favorite part about the interview, aside from learning that Ng originally started out studying theater and compares environmental design to scenic design (long ago, I studied theatrical scenic design myself), is this:

 I think games that are trying to appeal to young men can have kind of a macho thing going on, and it can create this culture where even the development team is kind of bro-y. A lot of it is determined by leadership. But with [the game] Spore we had Lucy [Bradshaw, executive producer of Spore] and she wanted the game to appeal to everyone, so the team didn’t have that attitude at all. There were women everywhere. I don’t think I had a single “did that happen because I’m not a dude” moment the entire time I was there. It was just about the work.

“Did that happen because I’m not a dude” is a great turn of phrase.  It’s a question that all kinds of women ask themselves when they suspect that they’ve encountered sexist attitudes in the workplace, because– contrary to popular belief– sexism in the workplace does not generally take the form of a co-worker or boss announcing “You’re a woman, and therefore I think less of you.”

Rather, it can be an environment in which women are treated differently, taken less seriously.  They might be outright harassed, but far more often they might be treated as if their views are less important. They might be interrupted or talked over. They might not be consulted on something they know about, in favor of a male co-worker who has less mastery of the subject.

When things like this happen, that woman’s first thought is likely to be “Did that happen because I’m not a dude?” She will ask herself this, and then maybe ask a co-worker who she trusts. The co-worker will hopefully commiserate, but even if so, there’s really not much the woman can do about this subtle sexism, especially if it comes from above.

So I can imagine what a tremendous relief it must’ve been for Ng to be in a working environment where she didn’t get that DiTHBINAD feeling; an unexpected relief because of the male-dominated industry in which she works.

I suppose a general term for behaviors that stir that DiTHBINAD feeling would be “microaggressions,” but I like the specificity of DiTHBINAD. If a woman in a male-dominated industry says that in a certain working environment she doesn’t get that feeling, we should sit up and take notice– that team, that department, maybe even that company as a whole, is doing something right. They should be recognized for that.

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